How many people did the average solider kill during WW1 and WW2?

Doubtful
Modern US soldiers kill even less than WWs ones
The main tactic of US forces now is

1. Send ground troops to bait the enemy outside of their hideouts
2. Once engaged, ground troops will take cover, shoot suppressing fire at the general direction of the enemy and call air support
3. Air support arrives and kill the enemy

US ground troops barely ever kill at all

you don't seem aware of battles like La Somme

Near 100% of deaths at the Somme were due to artillery, mud, exposure and barbed wire. Hundreds of me would become entangled in the wire and starve to death or from the rain.

It is the same for most wars in modern history, but it's just a meme that only 1% of men actually aim to kill

He's probably a mortarfag

Depends on the division, individual units, their commanders and on the amount of artillery they've had. Even with all the advancements in military technology, rifle fire was still largely inaccurate at medium to long range.

About six million.

You should read some books.

death from shitty supply lines are directly credited to zhukov's account.

Considering the total death tolls of either war was lower than the number of soldiers mobilized, the answer would be somewhere between 0 and 1.

Adding in what says, and it goes up by a lot if you're in an artillery crew or an Einsatzgruppenish unit, and way down if you're pretty much anything else.

>Also there is evidence that a majority of soldiers never even fired their guns at the enemy or that they did not shoot to kill evem if they had an open shot. Also don't forget that hitting a person with a bullet doesn't always kill them. There is a large chance that they will survive. So even the few people who did intentionally shoot to kill and not just fire to suppress, even fewer soldiers soils have killed enemy troops.
On Killing is bullshit and doesn't count as evidence. And the whole point of suppressive fire it to shoot where they would be if they pop up, so they stay down and the flanking element flanks and kills/the artillery lands on their head.

probably less than 1 if we are including the ones who died.

Silly OP, don't you know that during the war they weren't actually shooting each other?

youtube.com/watch?v=zViyZGmBhvs

Wonder how these pussy ass niggas would have fared in the Napoopan Wars
You couldnt just aim your bayonet near the enemy in a pretend attack if you wanted to vsurvive the day

total bullshit

Are you saying no one got shot in that war?

Some Americans get shot during their baiting opeartions, yes
But very few enemies were killed by US troops, it's mostly helicopters

There's most definitely a process from being engaged to helicopter support- firing ones rifle has a place in that process far before apache rocket death

I don't know, maybe... 5 or 6, my dude?

cringe

Yeah but the napoleonic soldiers were probably more motivated since they would often freely loot the dead and the average soldier was dirt poor.

I remember watching a Youtube video saying that less than 10% of the US Army in WW2 actually fired at the enemy with the intent to kill. Has someone heard about this?

Never mind found it

youtube.com/watch?v=zViyZGmBhvs

Really interesting video, but this reality did not apply to the Eastern Front.

80 20 rule

20% of the soldiers were doing 80% of the killing

>one machine gun per platoon
Just about every rifle section would have a LMG in the western armies.

>riflement have never shot anyone in the last century of warfare

That being said, the average soldier probably isn't in combat arms. It takes, well, an entire army in order to keep the joes up front fighting.

Lurk more you fucking faggot. Get the fuck off our board.

tyfys

Less than one.

>would become entangled in the wire and starve to death
I find it hard to believe wire is this effective

The average soldier of both wars never saw combat and fired zero shots at the enemy or even saw him.

Great grandfather killed 3 japs on Guadalcanal in hand to hand fighting. Stabbed 2 of them to death & strangled 1.He also shot a few

Triple threes confirm three dead japs

This is probably coming from some commiefag in a western euro country that the Nazis conquered within a few days to a few weeks.

Meanwhile most Soviet soldiers probably never killed anyone since you'd be splitting 1 German casualty between 12 Soviet casualties on average.

I love it when people get salty about superior fighting styles

CAS and danger close, because we can afford it - the American way

Zero.

For every line grunt there were 7 dudes behind the lines that never fired their weapons.

Even on the line, you won't know how many dudes you kill simply due to the fact that you spend more time shooting at likely or suspected targets than known targets. Amazingly enough, people don't like to expose themselves for very long in combat...

Unlike the British, we can do that and get away with it since we actually know how to call in fire on the enemy and not our own positions.

>US ground troops barely ever kill at all

"Never send good men to do what good high explosives can do better."

t. Grunt

Checked

They would have fared just fine as actual bayonet combat was extremely rare.

Well memed
Is that the meme general thread?
"Soldiers never shooted to kill during the world wars", "Bayonets were never used during the Napoleonic Wars"
We could use some Lindybeige ones too

>call in fire on the enemy and not our own positions.
You really should have a word with general Bradley.

Lindybeige made videos about both of those memes.

Bayonet wounds represented on average something like 5-10% of all the wounds soldiers suffered in the battles of the 18th and 19th centuries, I'm sorry but the Patriot is not a documentary.

Except these """datas""" were recorded on surviving wounded soldiers and are far from representative as most bayonet wounds were deadly (and thus not counted since the recording was on surviving wounded)

My great grandfather also was one of the tunnel rats. He went into tunnels underground with a flashlight and a .45 looking for japs to kill. He said they would throw in grenades & go into the tunnels to clear them out of japs. Apparently great grandpa had a set of brass balls. Pretty scary when you think about it. He still bitches about japs & he's 92 years old now.

>How many people did the average solider kill during WW1 and WW2?

The vast majority killed zero. This is a simple mathematical certainty. Number of soldiers >>> number of combat deaths. As has been the case for every war. In real life nobody respawns.

Very few. The vast majority of casualties were caused through artillery, not through bullets.

You're leaving out the number of civilians murdered.

You aim in their general direction, but it's true that small arms fire is meant to suppress, not to kill. Gunfire is aimed in only a general way, to fix them in place and force them to seek cover. Artillery does the killing, then and now, by a wide margin, followed by aerial bombs and waaay down the list is getting shot with a rifle. For the sake of discussion we're ignoring death by natural causes like disease and whatnot.

Not him, but depending on where you start with "Modern history", that's not quite true. For instance, in the Napoleonic wars, you had about 6-7 times as many casualties from musket fire as you did from artillery. Artillery only really starts getting the upper hand around the turn of the 20th century.

My pap said the japs were happy just to wound a soldier. If you kill 1 soldier that's it,1 soldier out of the battle. Wound him and you take out at least 3 men from the battle. The wounded guy plus at least 2 more taking care of him

>You're leaving out the number of civilians murdered.

That's a good point but it doesn't change the answer. 1.9 billion people served in WW2 in some capacity. All deaths, including civilians, was 72 million. So at most ~4% killed anybody. And realistically it's far less than that.

Fair enough, but the thread defined our area of interest as WW1 and WW2. Since WW1, artillery does the killing, right up to the present.

Since we are talking artillery. Grim factiods about why it accounted for most deaths

>In the first 10 hours of Verdun the Germans fired 1,000,000 shells.
>The French fired three million into an area 4km x 0.5 km.

youtube.com/watch?v=QxuOxdbK-BI

>That's a good point but it doesn't change the answer. 1.9 billion people served in WW2 in some capacity.

I have a bit of trouble believing that, given that the UN estimate of the world population in 1940 was about 2.3 billion, and that includes things like the elderly, disabled, children, and people living in bumfuck nowhere.

Oh yeah, sure. I was just quibbling with the phrase in of "modern history", which seemed to be branching off into its own thing.

He's totted up populations of all combatant countries.

But that includes an enormous number of people who aren't soldiers, and is a shitty metric.

While an exaggeration, barbed wire in no man's land is not what you're thinking of that you might see on a ranch or in a western. It has longer, shaper, and more frequently spaced barbs. And it wasn't pulled in a straight line that you could do some gymnastics to get between the 2 lines like a James Bond movie. It was thrown around in great big bundles of death with a frequently equipment stakes to keep it on the ground when the shelling happened. And if you manged to navigate one section there was 10 more just as harsh or worse to advance through.

You're right, I just picked the first Google result and I realize after its implausible. But it still doesn't really change the answer. The vast majority didn't kill anybody.

It was also thick. You could have expenses of wire that were 30 metres thick in places. It wouldn't snare a healthy man until he starved, but it would keep a wounded man pathetically hanging there until he succumbed.

There was actually a problem with people aiming high

>But this is all just my conjecture don't take this as gospel. I can't find any statistics
Bless you

That's just due to the nature of flintlock firearms though.
>Priming powder ignites a few inches from your face
>You flinch
>Barrel raises slightly
>Main charge goes off
>Ball goes high

>tfw he's a lying coward and either killed no one or raped and killed three children

>shot at distant gunfire and then the gunfire stopped
>CONFIRMED KILL!!!

correct me if I'm wrong though

We're talking about our modern forces.

It could mean other things :
-Bayonets are very lethal.
-A bayonet charge would often result in one side's morale collapsing and fleeing before much damage was made.
-The wounded tend to be finished after a successful charge, hence the low number of survivors.